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The next thing Jonah heard was a dial tone.

Chip slowly lowered the phone from his ear.

“She’ll call back,” he said confidently. “She didn’t give me a chance to answer any of her questions.”

“But she answered ours,” Jonah said.

“Not that she let us ask much!” Chip snorted. “I still need to know if she’s adopted, and if she got the same kind of letters we got, and if she knows what we all ‘survived,’ and…” Chip seemed to be working from some sort of mental checklist.

“Chip, don’t you get it? Those questions don’t matter right now.” Jonah eased the survivors list out of Chip’s hand and held it up. “I got this list three days ago, with Daniella McCarthy’s address on Robin’s Egg Lane. Her parents didn’t even see the house until yesterday. They haven’t made an offer on it yet, but they’re going to today. So”—he shook the list in Chip’s face—“how did the FBI know the future?”

“They couldn’t have,” Chip said.

Seconds passed while both of them stared hard at the list, the three-day-old list from the FBI that contained information no one should have been able to know until today. Jonah knew that they were almost at school, that the bus around them was filled with kids laughing and flirting and teasing and griping and even—here and there—singing. But Jonah couldn’t focus on anything except the survivors list. That and Chip’s voice, saying slowly, “Unless…”

“Unless what?” Jonah asked.

“Unless they’re the ones making her move.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jonah said. “Impossible.”

“Why?” Chip asked.

Jonah barely stopped himself from giving an answer that would have sounded like his dad: “Because the government is set up to serve the people. Not to ruin kids’ lives by making them move.” Instead he mumbled, “Why would they care where Daniella McCarthy lives? How could it matter to them? And to direct her family to that exact house—”

“Maybe one of Daniella’s parents is a top-secret scientist,” Chip said, “and some enemy is about to drop a bomb on their house, and so the FBI is moving them for their own safety….”

Jonah frowned at Chip and rolled his eyes.

“It’s Daniella’s name on the list,” Jonah said. “Not her parents’.”

“Maybe that’s just some sort of code,” Chip argued.

“What about all the other thirteen-year-olds on the list? Are all of our names some kind of code?” Jonah asked. “
My
parents aren’t top-secret scientists, I can tell you that. And nobody’s ever tried to make us move.” Still, Jonah felt a knot of anxiety in his stomach at the thought of moving. He’d lived his whole life in the same house—well, his whole life since he’d been adopted. “My mom would never agree to leave our house, not even if the president himself begged her to,” he said. “She’s spent too much time babying that rhododendron bush in our backyard. And her roses and her grapevines and everything else…”

Jonah had never cared that much about the rhododendron bush; he’d always thought Mom made way too much of a fuss about “those gorgeous blooms” and “Do you think they’re a little smaller than usual? Should I test the soil acidity again?” But now he pictured Mom clutching the trunk of the bush while some official-looking government types tried to pull her away: them arguing, “But you have to go!” while she countered, “I’ll never leave! Never!”

The image was strangely comforting.

“Hey!”

Jonah looked up to see the bus driver in the aisle in front of them. He was glowering.

“Let me explain something to you two,” he growled. “I pull up to your bus stop, you get on the bus. I pull up to your school, you get off. It’s not that complicated.”

Jonah realized that they were at school now; he and Chip were the only kids still on the bus.

“Oh, sorry!” he said, jumping up, grabbing his backpack.

“Maybe you want to go to the elementary school instead?” the bus driver asked. He seemed amused now. “That’s my next run. This is the day when all the little kids stay on the bus extra-long, to learn bus safety. Maybe you need that, just to learn to get on and off?”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Chip mumbled, scrambling up behind Jonah.

The bus driver stepped back between two of the seats to let them past him in the aisle. He was laughing at them.

“What a jerk,” Jonah muttered, as soon as they were out on the sidewalk. Other kids from other buses streamed past them, into the school. He tried to blend into the crowd. At least no one else had been on the bus to hear the driver making fun of them.

Chip grabbed Jonah’s arm.

“After school I’m going to call Daniella back,” Chip said. “Maybe she’ll have calmed down by then. And I want to call back the other kids on the list, to ask why they moved. You’ll help now, won’t you? Remember what you promised me? ‘I’ll do everything I can to help you.’”

Chip’s imitation of Jonah’s voice was frighteningly accurate.

I didn’t know what I was promising
, Jonah wanted to argue.
That was last week. I thought I’d just have to quote from
What to Tell Your Adopted and Foster Children.
Not solve mysteries. Not see ghosts. Not call strangers. Not figure out the FBI. Not…worry about my own past.

Chip’s blue eyes were pleading and desperate.

“Katherine’s all right and everything, but she’s too…cheerful about all of this,” Chip said. “She’s thinks it’s fun.”

What’s wrong with fun?
Jonah wanted to ask. But he knew exactly what Chip meant.

“All right,” Jonah said reluctantly. “After school.”

The day dragged. Jonah couldn’t concentrate on any of his classes. More than once, his teachers noticed and said, “Jonah? Are you with us?” or “Jonah? Didn’t you hear me the first
five
times I asked everyone to open their books?”

On the bus ride home, Jonah made sure he and Chip didn’t get too distracted. They were the first ones off the bus when it reached their stop.

Katherine bounced up eagerly behind them.

“How many names do you want to call today?” she asked. “I don’t have gymnastics tonight, and I did all my homework in study center, so I am ready to start dialing!”

Chip and Jonah exchanged glances.

“Well, see, I’ve got to get the mail first,” Chip said weakly. “And then…”

“No problem. I can wait,” Katherine said, grinning.

She followed the boys to the Winstons’ brick mailbox. Chip took his time about reaching in, drawing out the stacks of letters and magazines and junk mail. Jonah felt like telling him,
Look, if you think Katherine is going to get bored and leave, forget it. Once she’s into something, she never gives up.

Chip was so completely into his act, trying to get rid of Katherine, that he just stood there, staring at the stack of letters.

Maybe it wasn’t an act.

“Chip?” Jonah asked cautiously. “Is something wrong?”

Jonah remembered that lists and ghosts and the FBI weren’t all they had to worry about. He remembered that letters had been the first signs of strangeness.

“Chip?” Jonah repeated.

Chip held up a letter.

“It’s addressed to me, and there’s no return address,” he said. “But it’s not like the others.”

He was right. This letter was in a smaller envelope, the kind used for invitations. And Chip’s address wasn’t typed but written—in firm grown-up handwriting, like a teacher’s.

“Open it!” Katherine said excitedly. “Let’s see what this one says!”

Jonah turned to glare at his sister—what was wrong with her? Wasn’t she scared at all? How could she act so thrilled when he felt almost paralyzed with dread?

Katherine missed his glare because she was snatching the envelope out of Chip’s hand, ripping the letter open.

“Whoa,” she breathed.

“What is it?” Jonah asked. He discovered he wasn’t completely paralyzed. He could crane his neck and peer over Katherine’s shoulder.

The letter was on a piece of generic white paper. Unfolded, it said:

There was no signature.

“Angela DuPre,” Katherine said.

“Wh-what?” Jonah stammered.

“That’s who this is from,” Katherine said confidently, waving the letter in Jonah’s face. “Remember, Chip, she was the only one from the witnesses list who seemed kind of, I don’t know, regretful about hanging up on us. Is
regretful
a word?”

Jonah didn’t care about words right now.

“Well, it could have been—what was that other woman’s name?—Monique Waters?” Chip suggested.

“Oh, no,” Katherine said. “That woman
loved
hanging up on us. She was cold.”

“And the air traffic controller talked to you, not me,” Chip said, “so he wouldn’t send me a letter—”

“And this is definitely a woman’s handwriting. Definitely,” Katherine said.

Jonah was getting annoyed with their little junior detective routine.

“So are you going?” he asked. “On Saturday?”

Chip and Katherine both stopped talking. Both of them froze with their mouths hanging open. It wasn’t a good look for either of them.

Then Katherine laughed.

“Of course,” she said. “We have to!”

“This is a complete stranger,” Jonah said. “She won’t even sign her name. She won’t talk to you on the telephone. She sounds crazy. This is how people end up getting kidnapped.”

“But she’s got information,” Chip said. “She might know who I am.”

Chip sounded so plaintive, Jonah couldn’t argue anymore.

“If you’re going to kidnap someone, you wouldn’t ask to meet at the library,” Katherine said. “That conference room B—that’s where we used to have Brownie meetings when I was a little kid. It’s, like, glass on three sides. And you have to walk through the whole library to get to it. It’s safe.”

Jonah shrugged. He felt strangely dizzy, just like he had that time in Florida when he’d gotten caught in a riptide, and the flimsy little flutter kick he’d learned at the Liston Pool had been no match for the forces carrying him out to sea.

Jonah’s dad had jumped in and saved him that time.

He can’t save me now,
Jonah thought despairingly.
We can’t tell Mom and Dad anything about this. Can’t tell them we’re meeting a stranger. Can’t tell them we’ve been calling strangers. Can’t tell them we took pictures of a secret file…

“Besides,” Katherine was saying. “There’ll be three of us together, and no one adult could kidnap three kids.”

“How can you be so sure that she won’t bring anybody with her?” Jonah asked, at the same time that Chip said, “What if seeing all three of us scares her off? She sounds a little paranoid—I think it has to be just me.”

“Well, we’re all going,” Katherine said. “There’s no question about that!”

They didn’t get a chance to call any of the kids on the survivors list that afternoon—or the next—because they were so busy debating their strategy for meeting with Angela DuPre (if that was really who’d written the letter). Saturday morning, Jonah had a soccer game and Katherine had a piano lesson, but by two o’clock they were both in Chip’s driveway, on their bikes, waiting. Jonah focused on balancing carefully, lifting his toes from the concrete on first the left side, then the right. He could straddle the bike for seconds at a time without touching the ground.

As long as he concentrated on that little game, he didn’t have to think about the fact that he and Katherine and Chip were about to do something incredibly stupid and probably dangerous as well.

“You didn’t really leave a note, did you?” Katherine asked, breaking Jonah’s concentration and forcing him to slam his right foot down to the ground to keep from falling.

“I did,” Jonah said.

Katherine rolled her eyes.

The note was Jonah’s attempt at caution. They’d told Mom and Dad only that they were riding their bikes to the library. But in his desk drawer, Jonah had left a detailed note—a letter, really—explaining that they were meeting a woman named Angela DuPre (or possibly Monique Waters) and if for some reason they didn’t come back, someone should track her down. All the information about possible kidnappers would be on Chip Winston’s computer.

Katherine and Chip thought he was crazy for being so careful.

Katherine sighed, blowing the air out in a way that ruffled the hair on her forehead.

“Wish Mom could have driven us,” she said. “Nobody rides bikes anymore.”

“I do,” Jonah said.

“Girls, I mean,” Katherine said. “All my friends think bikes are babyish. No one had better see me.”

She looked around anxiously. The street was deserted.

Riding bikes versus being driven had caused a huge debate. Chip thought if they had a parent drive them, they’d have to explain why they had to be at the library exactly at three o’clock, rather than after their moms got through at the grocery store, or before their dads started watching the football game. And Jonah thought that if they had to make a quick getaway, it’d be ridiculous to stand there in the library lobby calling a parent, “Uh, yeah, I’m ready to be picked up. Do you mind not waiting until halftime? There’s kind of a murderous psychopath chasing me….”

“What do you really think is going to happen?” Katherine asked.

Jonah shrugged. She’d been asking him that question for two days. And he’d never been able to explain that, exactly, even to himself. He didn’t truly believe that they were about to face a murderous psychopath. He just had a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go away.

The garage door of Chip’s house began rising, revealing Chip and his bike. Chip was grinning.

“Time for some answers!” he proclaimed. Jonah thought maybe Chip was trying to sound like the donkey from
Shrek
—carefree, glib, and full of wisecracks even in the face of danger. But it wasn’t a very good imitation, because his voice cracked.

“First we’ve got to ride all the way over there,” Katherine complained. “What is it—two miles? Three?”

“We don’t have to go,” Jonah said.

“Of course we do,” Chip said, pushing off and sailing out into the street.

Jonah let Katherine follow Chip, and then he sighed and brought up the rear. It was weird how responsible he felt for the other two: plaintive, pitiful, confused Chip; naïve, gung-ho, enthusiastic Katherine. He and Chip were both equally tall and gangly—it wasn’t like Jonah had any extra muscles for fighting off attackers.

There’s strength in numbers
, he told himself, peddling hard to catch up.

They passed the BP station where the high-school band boosters were having a car-wash fund-raiser; the grocery store where Mom was right now buying peanut butter and milk and bread, like it was any Saturday afternoon; the neighborhood that, according to a quick Google search they’d done, contained the Robin’s Egg Lane where Daniella McCarthy’s family would soon be moving. They got to the library by two thirty.

Chip was looking at his watch before he even slipped off his bike.

“I’ve still got to wait another half hour?” he said. “I thought the ride would take longer than that.”

“This will give us a chance to case the joint,” Katherine said. Jonah
knew
she’d gotten that line from a movie. “And enough time to man our stations.”

Deciding how many of them should be in conference room B at three o’clock had sparked their longest and bitterest debate. They’d eventually reached a compromise: Chip would be the only one actually in the conference room. But he’d secretly have his cell phone set on speaker phone in his lap, and he’d call Katherine, who’d be hiding out in the magazine section. She’d hold the cell phone up to both her ear and a walkie-talkie, broadcasting to the other walkie-talkie in Jonah’s hand. Jonah would be in the nonfiction section, near the conference room. He’d be pretending to read, facing away from the conference room, but he’d secretly have a mirror hidden in his book, directed over his shoulder, so he could see what was happening to Chip every single minute. The walkie-talkie–phone combo would let him hear everything that was going on in the conference room. So at the first hint of danger, he’d be able to storm in and save Chip.

They’d planned everything. None of them, even once, had said, “This is ridiculous! Walkie-talkies? Mirrors hidden in books? We’ll look like fools!” Jonah thought maybe that was proof that, underneath it all, the other two were every bit as scared as he was.

They leaned their bikes against the bike rack and tiptoed into the library. They peeked into conference room B—no one was there—and tested out the cell phone–walkie-talkie setup.

“Spy One to Spy Two,” Katherine said, giggling into the walkie-talkie. “Over.”

Jonah switched the walkie-talkie function to
SEND
.

“Katherine, it works, but, so help me, you’ve got to remember—you’re not supposed to do any of the talking!”

At two fifty-five, Jonah flipped the hood of his sweatshirt up so it covered the walkie-talkie pressed against his ear. He pulled a book off a nonfiction shelf at random—it was something about tax codes. He positioned Katherine’s makeup mirror in the book, angled it just so…yep, there was Chip’s face, anxious and pale on the other side of the conference room’s glass wall. Jonah moved the mirror up and down and side to side, scanning the whole room. He switched the walkie-talkie to
SEND
again.

“Katherine, tell Chip to stop fiddling with the cell phone,” he whispered urgently. “He’ll give us away.”

Seconds later, in the mirror, Chip jerked upright. He put his hands flat on the conference room table, on top of the printouts of the survivors and witnesses lists he’d brought from home. He raised an eyebrow at Jonah. Over his shoulder, Jonah gave him the thumbs-up signal.

Katherine’s giggle sounded in Jonah’s ear again.

“Remember your theory about this woman actually being Chip’s birth mother?” she whispered. “You can cross that one off your list!”

Jonah started to say, “Why?” but then he remembered that
he
needed to be silent too. Over the walkie-talkie, he heard a static-y version of Chip’s voice: “Oh, hello. Are you the person who reserved this conference room for three o’clock? The one who’s willing to talk?”

Frantically, Jonah angled the mirror, turning his tax code book almost sideways. There. A woman, walking into the conference room. Oh. A tall, statuesque, well-dressed
black
woman. Very dark-skinned—definitely not Chip’s birth mother.

“Chip Winston?” the woman was saying.

“Yes,” Chip said cautiously. “And you are—?”

The woman stopped in the conference room doorway and looked back over her shoulder. Her eyes seemed to meet Jonah’s in the mirror. She laughed.

“Before we begin, I’ll have to ask you to turn that cell phone off,” she said. “And tell your friends to turn off the walkie-talkies. I appreciate their ingenuity, but they might as well come on in and listen in person.”

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chip stammered.

“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” the woman said. “I’ll have to remember that. I’m talking about the girl in the magazine section, in the purple shirt, and the boy in the tax section, reading
Your Guide to the IRS
upside down.”

Jonah blushed. He started to turn the book around, then realized that that made him look even more guilty. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Katherine standing up, rushing toward the conference room. He waved his arms at her, trying to send a telepathic message,
No, no, go back! Pretend you’ve got nothing to do with me or Chip! Act normal! Don’t give anything away!

Katherine ignored him. She reached the door into the conference room and began shaking the woman’s hand.

“Katherine Skidmore,” she introduced herself. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for letting me join you.”

Katherine made it sound like they were going to be sitting around eating sugar cookies and drinking lemonade.

“Come on, Jonah,” Katherine said. “She’s got us figured out.”

Jonah whirled around.

“But I don’t have to go in there, do I?” he muttered through gritted teeth. “I can stay out here if I want to. So I can run for help if anything happens.”

Jonah was surprised to see that the woman’s dark eyes were sympathetic.

“You’re the one I want guarding the door, then,” she said. “Watching out for trouble. You can watch from the outside or watch from the inside. I don’t care.”

She looked around, scanning the rows of bookshelves around them. No one was in sight.

“I’m Angela DuPre,” the woman said, holding out her hand to Jonah. “You can call me Angela.”

Hesitantly, Jonah moved forward to shake her hand. He stepped in through the glass door behind Katherine and Angela, and pulled the door shut. But he didn’t sit down at the table when the others did. He stayed by the door. Angela nodded respectfully at him, as if she approved of that choice.

“A little advice,” Angela said, a hint of laughter in her voice. “The next time you do a stake-out, don’t enter the building together.” It was Jonah she looked at now. “I got here at two. I’ve been watching the three of you for the past half hour.”

Jonah’s face burned.

“I guess the walkie-talkies were a stupid idea,” he mumbled.

“Oh, it was creative,” Angela said. “I would have left you to your spy games if it weren’t for the range on those things—I didn’t want our conversation broadcast to every trucker passing by on the highway. Or…others who might want to listen.”

She no longer sounded amused. Her eyes looked haunted.

Katherine was glaring at Angela.

“Oh, that’s right,” Katherine said, almost in the same snarly cat-fight voice she used when she was mad at her friends. “You’re afraid to even talk on the phone.”

“I have my reasons,” Angela said softly, and somehow that shut Katherine up.

“But it’s safe to talk now?” Chip asked eagerly, leaning forward. “You can give us answers?”

Angela gave another cautious look around, through the glass walls into the library, then through the windows into the parking lot. Jonah realized for the first time that Angela had taken the one seat in the room that backed up to a solid brick wall. Even if Jonah weren’t guarding the door, she’d made sure that nobody could sneak up on her.